GRUB vs BootManage TCP/IP BOOT-PROM

[Malte Forkel]

Hi,

I have a couple of older PCs that I would like to use as diskless Linux
clients. They have a BootManage TCP/IP BOOT-PROM from a company named bootix
, formerly Incom GmbH. As far as I understand, this is pre-PXE and has
various options to boot a PC. Especially, it can start a boot image
(specifically created from a DOS boot disk) or start another boot loader
(via a special boot image named BPBOOT). There is plenty of documentation
and software for TCP/IP BOOT-PROM at
http://www.bootix.com/download/download_en.html.

I would like to start GRUB via the TCP/IP BOOT-PROM to profit from GRUB's
configurability and flexibility, but have not managed to do so. I would
appreciated any suggestions on what to do or try.

Here is what if have tried so far. As I know little to nothing about boot
loaders, some of these attempts probably look pretty stupid to the expert's
eye.

Using the TCP/IP BOOT-PROM to boot an image created form a FAT GRUB boot
floppy runs into a "GRUB Hard Disk Error". May be GRUB is unable to
determine the size of the RAM disk it is running from?

Same error occurs when using stage1 as the boot image. Using an adapter in
front of stage2
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2005-09/msg00033.html) to make
GRUB look like a linux kernel halts the machine or produces garbage after an
initial promising "Linux" (with BPBATCH, see below).

BPBATCH, as described in the Linux Remote-Boot HowTo, can be used to boot
Linux with a TCP/IP BOOT-PROM. I successfully booted an old RedHat 7.2
kernel, but failed with SuSE 2.4 or 2.6 ("Direct booting from floppy is no
longer supported. Please use a boot loader") kernels.

The TCP/IP BOOT-PROM boot image format seems to be different from those used
by Netboot and PXE. I ran into various errors trying nbgrub and pxegrub or
images created with mknbi.

According to bootix, it should be possible to use the image of a DOS boot
disk with loadlin and a Linux kernel. I have not tried this. The image size
is limited to 2,880 kb and preparing multiple image(s) is rather tedious and
not very flexible.

So, how do I run GRUB from the BootManage TCP/IP BOOT-PROM?.

Thanks,
Malte